IBM and Nvidia have been awarded $425 million by the US Department of Energy to build two brand-new supercomputers that leverage IBM’s Power8 CPUs and Nvidia’s upcoming Volta GPUs. The two computers — Summit, which will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra, built at Lawrence Livermore — will have peak performance of around 150 petaflops when they’re completed in 2017-2018.

The super-laser being built by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will put all others to shame with 1 petawatt of power at 10Hz. The HAPLS laser will sit at the heard of the ELI-Beamlines facility in Europe after it has been thoroughly tested.

The National Ignition Facility in California has become the first fusion power facility to create a fusion reaction that generates more power than it requires to get the reaction started. This is perhaps the most important step ever towards the always-just-out-of-reach realization of clean, self-sustaining, limitless fusion power.

DARPA and the US Army have taken the wraps off ARGUS-IS, a 1.8-gigapixel video surveillance platform that can resolve details as small as six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet (6km). ARGUS is by far the highest-resolution surveillance platform in the world, and probably the highest-resolution camera in the world, period.

The USA has beaten back the Chinese and Japanese to reclaim pole position on the 39th Top500 list — the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. As a result, China is now promising to deliver a 100-petaflops by 2015 — some two years before the rest of the world is expected to reach such lofty heights.

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